It's not quite as bad as you are describing it. IME, TUIs via ncurses, UNICODE characters (e.g. for box drawing) and at least 256 colors work pretty much everywhere and gets you pretty far (think 'Turbo Pascal' or 'htop' style UIs).

...unless you're on the old DOS/Windows terminal of course (the new one should be much more conformat: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/windows-terminal/9N0...)